March
1, 2009 Des Moines
Psalm
25:1-10
Tune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace
Well, there was that whole
problem with the neighbor's wife. We
like to remember David as the hero king of Israel – the progenitor of Israel's
“Camelot” days when all was well and all was good in ways that only later
unraveled and fell apart. After all,
wasn't the coming Messiah – the one that everyone was waiting for – supposed to
be of the “house and lineage” of David – “like” David in every way, not just
family tree? The answer, of course, is
finally “yes,” but it is a good bit more complicated than that. Enter “the neighbor's wife.”
David
certainly knew better. I mean, there it
is, right there on the tablets Moses had brought down from the mountain: “You shall not covet your neighbor's
wife.” But somehow springtime, or
boredom, or opportunity, or arrogance, or perhaps simply hormones got the
better of him. Or maybe King David had
simply fallen into a style of rulership in which he behaved like a law unto
himself -- prefiguring by centuries Richard Nixon’s retort to journalist David
Frost, that “when the President of the United States does it, it isn’t
illegal.”
The
neighbor, of course, was away on official business, which created the
“opportunity.” And then there was that
blue sky and the warm sun and the tall, sweating glass of iced tea. So it was that one day Bathsheba was out in
her backyard getting a tan, and the next day she was “interning” in the Oval
Office. So to speak.
Who
knows just how David's song had gotten so off key. There had been such promising beginnings –
that whole sling shot and rock business against Goliath, the Philistine giant;
there was getting selected from among his brothers to replace Saul as King, despite
his age and inexperience; there was his early integrity and nobility. It had all started off so well. But it happens, you know. Fluctuations in temperature – even spiritual
temperature – can cause all kinds of things to go out of tune.
And so
it was with David – a reckless appetite carelessly indulged, that led to death,
dishonor, sexual misconduct and abuse.
Eventually confronted with his sin – with how “discordant” he had become
– he was driven into contrition.
Tradition has characterized Psalm 51 as coming from David in the throws
of this remorse: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within
me. Or, to put it into different
terms, “help me get back in tune.”
It
isn't just a prayer for kings. We all
get out of tune from time to time – sometimes becoming stretched too tight by
stress that we go sharp and shrill; sometimes going loose and slack and
rattling without any real character at all.
Useful, then, this annual season in the church's way of arranging time
whose sole purpose it is to listen carefully for the Gospel pitch and how it is
reverberating in our own discipleship.
Throughout
this particular season of Lent we will be using as our prayerful guide the
confessions and supplications of the familiar hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
Maybe you haven't thought of it as a prayer before, but look more
carefully at its lyrics and you will see that's precisely what it is.
The
hymn was written by a man named Robert Robinson who apparently lived in some
need of prayer. Born to poor parents in
a small town in England, Robinson's father died while the boy was only
eight. When he was fourteen, Robinson's
mother sent him to London where he was apprenticed to learn the barbering
trade. The consensus among biographers
is that “for the next few years he was associated with a notorious gang of
hoodlums and lived a debauched life.”
At the
age of seventeen he attended a meeting where George Whitefield was
preaching. Robinson and his friends went
for the purpose of ‘scoffing at the poor, deluded Methodists.’ However, Whitefield’s strong evangelistic
preaching so impressed young Robinson that he was converted to Christ. Several years later he felt called to preach
and entered the ministry of the Methodist Church. Subsequently, he left the Methodist Church
when he moved to Cambridge and became a Baptist pastor. Here he became known as an able theologian
through his writing of many theological works as well as several hymns.”
Robinson
wrote the text of this hymn when he was only 23 years of age.
The reference
to being “prone to wander…” seems to have been auto-biographical – or perhaps
prophetic. In his later years Robinson
reverted to some of his youthful habits, “characterized by lapses into sin and
unstableness.”
As if
to punctuate that spiritual wanderlust, the story is told that “Robinson was
one day riding a stagecoach when he noticed a woman deeply engrossed with a
hymn book. During an ensuing
conversation the lady turned to Robinson and asked what he thought of the hymn
she was humming. Robinson burst into
tears and said, ‘Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many
years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the
feelings I had then.’”[1]
All of
which is to say that the hymn with which we will be living for the next several
weeks did not waft from the rarefied air of spiritual purity, but rather the
honest strugglings of a man very much like ourselves: a person whose ideals and aspirations did not
always work themselves out in practice, and who therefore found himself
perpetually in need of repair and renewal.
Among
the hymn's other, hopefully more substantive attributes, the hymn has, through
the generations, spawned a kind of Trivial
Pursuits fascination and curiosity over what could be its most memorable
line: Here I raise mine Ebenezer…And we will get to that – later in the
season – but for now I will keep you in suspense with the questions of “who –
or what – is Ebenezer, and why are we raising him?” Presently I am more interested in a different
phrase, lifted from the first verse of the hymn, that I believe perfectly
captures the real work of Lent: Tune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace. Tune my heart.
It is,
as I mused with the good folk who attended the Wednesday midday service,
primarily a musical term in my personal phrasebook. As a noun it is used to
refer to the actual notes that string together to create an actual “tune”. As a verb it is used to refer to the
adjustment of an instrument to a correct or given standard of pitch, or the
bringing something – or someone – into harmony.
But if
you aren't all that musical, that's fine, because it is also a mechanical term
– referring to the adjustment of an engine, for example, into proper
functioning; a “tune-up” so to speak.
And radio operators “tune” their receivers to make them compatible with
certain broadcast frequencies – “tuning in” they might describe it.
The
hymn, then, can suit us all – musical, mechanical, or audiophile. Tuning.
Tuning in, tuning up, or getting “in tune,” the various metaphors all
agree on a single truth: sometimes we
get out
of tune. Sometimes the static is all we
hear, and sometimes our character displays – our behaviors, our language, our
aspirations and our longings – find themselves in decided dissonance with the
longings of God and the example of Jesus, and we can either just remain there,
getting further and further out of tune and into the static, or we can pay
closer attention to the harmonics and make the necessary adjustments.
Even
in those times when we may not be far off, it’s important to “bang the tuning
fork” to get a sounding – the auditory equivalent of “true north.”
Tune
my heart to sing thy grace.
Sometimes
such moments come at a time not of our choosing. In that Old Testament story of David with
which we began, it wasn't David's own remorse that brought about his
repentance, but the indictment of his trusted friend and advisor Samuel. And in another, quite different story, Jesus
had no sooner dried off from his baptism in the River Jordan, according to the
gospels, than the Spirit of God “drove him into the wilderness” for a time of
testing. It wasn’t at all, we are led to
believe, to cause him to fail, but rather as it is with strenuous calisthenics,
to strengthen him so that he wouldn’t; or, like a cardiac stress test, to help
reveal those areas that could fail, and take whatever steps might be necessary
to prevent it.
In our
case, it isn't Samuel holding us accountable or the Holy Spirit's unique
diversion as much as it is the season itself – the church's gift to us each
year – that draws us into prayerful reflection and critique and
discernment: this prayer that God will
take the pegs of our heart strings and turn them into tune; that God will tweak
our wanting and our doing to rid them of knocks and backfires and spluttering
stops; that God will speak to us in tones we can adequately, clearly hear if we
are to be the disciples God seeks and we desire us to be.
This,
then, is the work of these days – but, then, more truthfully the prayer of our
lives:
Come,
thou fount of every blessing; tune my heart to sing thy grace.